The Big Society idea has been under scrutiny & challenge ever since it began. Most recently Liverpool City Council have withdrawn their involvement in being one of the four pilot areas for the idea. (BBC news link here). Just a day ago, the outgoing head of the Community Service Volunteers (Dame Elisabeth Hoodless) voiced her concerns about how cuts are destroying the Big Society idea (BBC news link here).
As a consequence I have been following Lord Nat Wei's blog with interest - he is the Big Society 'Csar' who has been promoting the idea from its early beginning. This morning, I was prompted by his most recent post entitled: Local Authorities and Big Society in the Age of Austerity (link here) to respond.
Below is what I have posted on his site - although as of now it is yet to appear:
If the Big Society is about anything, it must be about inclusiveness and bringing people from outside the tent into the inside. In this respect, your partisan opening comment of ‘Labour’s huge deficit’ does you no favours. If anything calling it simply ‘the huge deficit’ would help to build some bridges which the Big Society idea badly needs right now.
I do like and appreciate the Big Society concept, by the way. But I am in this debate as a critical friend as well as advocate. Politics and economics aside, if the Big Society can do anything to mitigate the public service cuts which are being made, then I support it wholeheartedly.
Where I am very concerned is where the Big Society is being invoked, without trial, test or evaluation, as the way in which severe cuts will not really be felt. This is what is happening in Buckinghamshire at the moment where the County Council is slashing (disproportionately) the youth service budget. (See ‘Keep the spirit of Big Society alive’). As far as I can see, they are not investing in the kinds of capacity building you outline. The likelihood is that without enough structures in place, there will be less volunteering in the future, not more.
Certainly the best public services have been engaging their citizens/customers/users/clients for some while – long before the ‘Big Society’ existed as a concept. It is certainly something I have been talking about for many years. (At this event, I talked about the evidence based citizenship: http://tinyurl.com/sureypaagm2005 and there more on my blogs at: http://jonharveyassociates.blogspot.com/2009/05/empowered-citizenship.html and here in the context of income generation: http://smallcreativeideas.blogspot.com/2009/04/thinking-about-income-generation.html) So getting the users of a service to do more while saving resources being spent is old – as old as when we began filling our own fuel tanks at filling stations, at least.
Yes, there is a great need to get more users/citizens/customers involved in picking up the litter (to use your example – although better not to drop it in the first place!), and there are huge cultural impediments within local authorities towards doing this more (not least the risk averse culture fuelled by the ‘no win/no fee’ lawyers hanging around on street corners). But all of this will not happen by magic or by merely hoping that the invisible hand of the social market place will result in volunteers and philanthropists rushing into the vacuum left by the public service cutbacks.
Certainly core costs can be reduced further and perhaps part time working could be a way ahead. I don’t know if any councils or other public service agencies are considering this. However, when commercial firms did this to survive the recession, as you cite, they did this as their order books were down. There was less demand on their services or products. The comparison to public services does not work in quite the same way unless you are suggesting that the police say to their public that they are going on short working so please could crimes now not be committed between the hours of 2 and 6 o’clock in the morning....?
Partnerships are also not new. As you know most local authorities have been developing their compacts with their local third sector agencies and have been looking to extend partnership arrangements with them over many years. But to repeat... this requires investment and indeed time. The time is critical as without it trust cannot develop. As you well know, partnerships do not work without trust. Is there the time to develop further trusting partnerships now before the cutbacks begin to really bite?
In sum, yes there is a need to be pragmatic and tenacious about making the Big Society work and I am not in the group of people who are urgently looking for it to fail (from both the right and left of the spectrum). My overriding concern is that the investments in Big Society development are not being bold or strategic enough. There is insufficient recognition that the transition to a Bigger Society and a Smaller Government is one that cannot simply happen. Shrewd investment and good local leadership will be critical
Hi,I think Jon is right in seeking more imagination when the public sector is investing public money into the social economy, whether under the name of Big Society. Governments of all sorts have historically worked with and supported civil society. But by always having the focus on bad behaviours we often forget the strength of the social contract that does motivate many people to be socially altruistic, caring and thoughtful.The danger of the cuts is that its eroding that contract, damaging the hopes of thousands of volunteers and their supporters in charities and in communities. People are being continually being fed bad news about things they can't change and that doesn't encourage them to act more.I see local authorities acting like rabbits in the headlights of the approaching cuts juggernaut. Often simply not engaging. Councils are understandably focussed on massive internal challenges around which colleague to fire or where to re-structure. Justifying massive youth service cuts, following best practise in the compact or rethinking commissioning is just too difficult as well.The good news is that some councils have carried on and have trusted their citizens, albeit still at the margins. Most interestingly parish councils, with their freedom to raise their precepts are often doing so to protect services. Few parish councillors I've talked get complaints about doing so.Unitary, District or County Councils aren't being allowed to offer their residents a simple choice - would you pay more tax to retain this or that service, with the proviso that you will get a direct say in how its being spent. That's a fair question to ask, a mature and adult question that respects citizens and recognises the value of public service and local democracy. Why can no-one offer me that choice?Because my suspicion is that given the opportunity most citizens would willing invest in 'the big society'. We do value youth work, our libraries, our woodlands, or caring for the elderly. We do want local volunteers and local charities to be supported. We even have a mechanisms like Participatory Budgeting to be able to do it..What we lack is real political will to decentralise. Trust at the centre to really take on change, and look again at local income tax, capping, local control over local taxation, or the way centralised non domestic rates transfers power to Whitehall. Even Ernst and Young, hardly radical supporters of increasing public spending argued for more local freedom and imagination in their report " can councils live without the formula grant?"The current pace of change is feeling pretty reckless and headlong. The cure seems worse than the disease. We do know that it can be done better. We need a positive vision from the centre. Not, as we still hear too often, recriminations over what people have done (or not done) in the past.Thanks Jon for your regular blogsJez Hall
ReplyDelete... and still we wait for Nat Wei to include your comments ...
ReplyDeleteIn Scotland there has been an Open Letter to the government. The community sector is asking for decentralisation " The Scottish Government has indicated that it wants to develop a more strategic relationship with the Third Sector. This will be no easy task because the Third Sector itself is complicated and full of overlapping relationships. Despite the complexity, we think that it is helpful to see the Sector as having three distinct segments – social enterprise, voluntary and community. While the distinctions between the three segments may often seem blurred, there are also some fundamental differences which require these distinctions to be made. This is why we have established the Scottish Community Alliance and why the chairpersons of Scotland’s leading community networks have co-signed an open letter which lays out the case for the community sector to be recognised in its own right.Best wishesAngus Hardie Scottish Community Alliance – local people leading The untapped potential of communities Dear sir Leading networks within Scotland’s community sector have come together to form the Scottish Community Alliance. Everyone lives in a community of some description and many people – hundreds of thousands of them – take an active part in helping to make them better places to live. Thousands of local groups operate across the country. Some are formal organisations employing staff, while others are run entirely by volunteers. The range of what they do is enormous – from owning windfarms with a potential income of millions to running the village hall, a community bus or growing community allotments. It is this mass of grassroots activity that forms the bedrock of our society – our Big Society. However we believe Scotland’s community sector – its scale, achievements and contribution to Scottish prosperity - have been undervalued and unrecognised for too long. Despite our significant achievements to date, we believe the real potential of the community sector remains untapped. There are huge reserves of creative energy and resourcefulness that can and should be harnessed for the common good of the country. In order to achieve this we call on government, at local and national level, to work with the community sector in a renewed spirit of partnership based on trust and mutual respect. A first step would be a formal acknowledgement from Scottish Government of the community sector as a distinctive force in re-shaping Scottish society. The leading networks of the community sector are coming together for the first time as the Scottish Community Alliance to formally represent our sector’s interests to the Scottish Government. Yours sincerely Carola Bell - chairpersonCommunity Energy Scotland Paul Johnston - chairpersonCommunity Resources Network Scotland Norman MacDonald - chairCommunity Retail Network Jim McCreath – chairperson of Scottish CommitteeCommunity Transport Association(UK) Michaela Hunter - chairpersonCommunity Woodlands Association Alex Walker - chairpersonDevelopment Trusts Association Scotland Bill Kirkhope - chairpersonEVH – supporting social employers David Drury - chairpersonFederation of City Farms and Community Gardens Peter Howden - chairpersonGlasgow and West of Scotland Forum of Housing Associations Ian Welsh - presidentScottish Allotments and Gardens Society Stephen Sweeney - chairpersonScottish League of Credit Unions Sophie Green - chairpersonSenscot Peter McCall - chairpersonTransition Scotland Support
ReplyDeleteThrough all the bad news, the beating, the loss of facilities (and the toilet(s) in Manchester?) does Big Society amount to a bit of a zero sum game - all we have left, even if it's so weakly defined?And are we really seeing it as the only game in town? Where did all the 'engagement & empowerment' agenda, and work done on it in the previous administration get to? Jez has noted the excellent work done on PB - what else should we be pointing to, building on?
ReplyDeleteTowards the ends of his postings, Jon refers to the apparent counterbalance between big society and small government. I wonder if attention needs drawing to the apparent incongruity of a government that has stressed this counterbalance, and even set about reducing the size of parliament. Yet the size of the government appears undiminished. Off course the size of the departments of state appear under threat, but the officers of state are as large as ever. I appreciate that the number of Conservative Ministers is somewhat smaller than they may have wished (and presumably the number of Lib Dems larger than they expected) but it still seems to me that we have a large government.
ReplyDeleteJust a quick couple of ideas of where positively to look to build our society, big or small... given Solihin Garrard asked the question.I would point to what used to be called 'community technical aid' (CTA). Not for profit partnership bodies uniting University architecture departments, local authority planning departments and the Town and Country Planning Institute to make independant expert knowledge available to communities on how to develop complex projects like new community centres or take over council assets.There used to be around 30 CTA's around the country, now there is only half a dozen. Comtechsa in Liverpool is a good example. I think we need more bodies like this able to bridge the gap between the public and social economy.I think homes for Change, though not a product of Manchester's CTA I used to work for in the 1990's had links with it, and the result was good design.other ideas...The Community Planning toolkit is an invaluable free resource of useful ways for the public sector to engage their communities.London Citizens and Changemakers, inspired by community organising in the USA.On a more local level organisations like Unlimited Potential, a community led health and wellbeing social enterprise in Salford.Jez
ReplyDeleteAlongside those councils making disproportionate cuts there are increasing numbers who are either maintaining investment in civil society activities, or even increasing it. Essex and Kent have both recently announced investments funds to support new social enterprises, while Wiltshire have announced further investment in to community activity. This is alongside Reading, Thurrock and Wolverhampton who have already announced they will maintain their spend to charities and voluntary organisations.I think we have seen a delay while authorities understand and interpret the implications of their funding settlement, and the best ones are now rising to the challenge. Councils themselves are going through difficult times as they make redundancies and restructure, which can make it hard to also be creative with external partners and services.
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